Faster than a speeding bullet train, the cost of the state’s massive high-speed rail project has zoomed to nearly $100 billion — triple the estimate given to voters and more than enough to run the entire state government for a year.

What’s more, bullet trains won’t be up and running until at least 2033, much later than the original estimate of 2020, although that depends on the state finding the remaining 90 percent of the funds needed to complete the plan.

The beauty of that lead is that it tells you pretty much everything you need to know about a public works project and places it in some digestible context. As the story goes on to explain, the California High-Speed Rail Authority did indeed release its “business plan” for this boondoggle. If you were alarmed by the $98.5 billion estimate in the Mercury News story and hoped it was inflated, sorry.

As Rick Moran put it at The American Thinker, they call it a bullet train “because taxpayers will feel like pointing a gun to their head after the true costs of the project are revealed.”
And that $98.5 billion is just the latest estimate. You don’t expect that to be the final price tag, do you? Voters were told $33.6 billion. A subsequent re-evaluation kicked it up to $43 billion. Wait until they start hiring union-waged workers to lay track.

The line, if it’s ever built, will run from San Francisco through the Central Valley to Los Angeles and finally Anaheim. By car, the trip takes 6 1/2 hours. By high-speed rail, 2 1/2 hours. By air, 75 minutes. If all three modes of transport remain active two or three decades from now, perhaps we’ll find out the demand for high-speed rail.

California, as you may have heard, has some budgetary issues to contend with. So which taxpayers should come up with the who-even-knows how many billions this dubiously needed rail line will require? Let’s go to Rosenberg’s latest story, filed today:

The state now hopes to gobble up billions of dollars from taxpayers in chunks to extend the first, $6 billion stretch of track in the Central Valley to either San Jose or the San Fernando Valley so the trains can start running. To do that, the rail authority hopes to get $20 billion in federal grants and tax credit bonds — revenue sources don’t currently exist — and supplement that with $5 billion in state bonds.

After that, the rail authority expects to start service and churn a profit, which they expect will lead private investors to pour $11 billion into the project.

In addition to the hoped-for federal and state sources, the authority hopes cities, counties and transportation agencies will chip in money or donate land, give advances on possible revenue such as parking fees or naming rights for stations, or pass local tax hikes.

Seems like a lot of hoping, and “revenue sources” that “don’t currently exist”?

We can argue all day about whether any state needs a really fast train to duplicate more slowly a route that airplanes service pretty well now. It would seem a tougher sell that federal taxpayers in Texas should help foot the bill for one in California.